This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 20, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Mario Vargas Yosa has received this year's Nobel Prize in literature,

but he is more than that.

He has been an outspoken figure against Latin American

abuses of human rights. He spoke at the Cato Institute on the intersection of art and the struggle

for freedom and modernization in Latin America.

The event was held in November 2006.

I was asking myself,

is this exactly true everything is on the guts in Latin America? Well no I think you

have an exception to this rule of general decay, which is literature.

I am not a nationalist, I am not arrogant but I can I I think that you can say that in this particular field, literature, and maybe in a wider artistic field, painting,

music, Latin America has a very different reality.

I think this is fair to recognize that we have been producing in Latin America poems, novels, paintings, musical compositions, musical compositions that are not provincial, that are not underdeveloped, that can be compared without any kind of complex with the best standards,

artistic and literary all over the world.

If you think in a poet like Néuda or Octavio Pass,

or César Valéjojo in novelists like Vallejo Carpentier, Garcia

Marcus in a writer like Jorge Wies Borges and if you think you're thinking in paintings like Lam, Tamayo, you think you very much.

And if you're thinking in paintings like Lam, Tamayo, well, Diego Rivera.

If you think that Latin America has been making, dancing the whole world for the last 20 or 30 years.

You can say that in this particular field,

Latin America is not an underdeveloped world, that is a world that has been evolving,

...